Sea of Blue Algae

JOSAI UNIVERSITY EDUCATIONAL CORPORATION UNIVERSITY PRESS

Mizuta Noriko is a poet and the Chancellor of Josai University Educational Corporation. She won the Chikada Prize for Poetry, presented by the Embassy of Sweden in 2013.

Mizuta Noriko

Jordan A. Y. Smith

“Melancholy on the other hand is more of an unconscious process

without an identifiable or singular loss, and is therefore regarded as an

unwell condition.”

Flow of blue inkParting the algae

From "Introduction

―Mo / Mourning / Monogatari:Untraslatables and Intermediaries

in Mizuta Noriko's Sea of Blue Algae"

by Jordan A. Y. Smith

TH

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AD

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JOSAI UNIVERSITY EDUCATIONAL CORPORATION UNIVERSITY PRESS

Translated by

Mizuta Noriko

Jordan A. Y. Smith

Sea of Blue Algae

Jacket Illustration: Ryuji MitaniJacket Design & Interior Layout: Takuya Tawara

Sea of Blue Algae

Jordan A. Y. Sm

ithT

ranslated by

Mizuta N

oriko

Jordan A. Y. Smith is Associate Professor ofInternational Humanities atJosai International University. He hastranslated poetry by Yoshimasu Gozo andNomura Kiwao, and fiction fromAlberto Fuguet and Fernand Iwasaki.

ISBN978-4-907630-53-9

C0082 ¥1500E

1,500円本体定価：＋税

C M Y K Kinmei

Sea of Blue Algae

Copyright ⓒ 2013by Noriko MizutaEnglish translation copyright ⓒ 2015by Jordan A. Y. SmithOriginally published in Japan byShichosha in 2013 as AOI MO NO UMI （『青い藻の海』）

All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproducedin any manner whatsoeverwithout written permission from the publisher.

Published byJosai University Educational Corporation University PressURL:http://www.josai.jp/jupress/

Introduction:“Mo/Mourning/Monogatari: Untranslatables and Intermediaries in Mizuta Noriko’s Sea of Blue Algae”by Jordan A. Y. Smith .................................................................................. 5Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... 36

Section I: To the River..... 37To the River ............................................................................................. 38If You Happen into a Deep Sleep ......................................... 41Who Is Awaiting This Day ? ...................................................... 43One-year Memorial ......................................................................... 44Poetry Will Wait ................................................................................. 48Digital Blue ............................................................................................ 50Life Notes .................................................................................................. 55Give Me Blue ......................................................................................... 58Obon ............................................................................................................. 65

Section II: Garden................... 71Gardenkeeper ........................................................................................ 72Sleeping Gardenkeeper ................................................................. 74When the Gardenkeeper Leaves ............................................ 77I Try to Change the Garden ...................................................... 80

Table of Contents

Section III: Museums..... 83On the Lushun Museum ............................................................. 84On the Museum of Asian Art ................................................... 87 On the Fossil Museum ................................................................. 90

Section IV: Sea of Blue Algae..... 951 An Unfamiliar Place ................................................................... 962 Waiting ................................................................................................. 983 Odd for the Season ..................................................................... 994 Dreadfully Vivid ......................................................................... 1025 Lost Vision....................................................................................... 1046 A Single Drawing ...................................................................... 1057 Gravity ................................................................................................ 1078 Vomiting ........................................................................................... 1099 Splitting .............................................................................................. 11210 To the Boat ...................................................................................... 116

Original Japanese Poems............................................................. 119

5Sea of Blue Algae

It is always productive to play with the title of a translated textit helps excavate the many layers of potential meaning. In this case, particularly so. Sea of Blue Algae could have been rendered into so many English variants that it is easier to talk about each component separately rather than to list them (there were around a dozen viable candidates). The title, Aoi mo no umi 『青い藻の海』, contains both simple and complex potential in terms of diction for each word, one syntactic ambiguity, and one double entendre.

“Mo/Mourning/Monogatari: Untranslatables and Intermedi-aries in Mizuta Noriko’s Sea of Blue Algae”

Jordan A. Y. Smith

Of Moand Multiplicity I

6 Sea of Blue Algae

First of all, there were somewhat simple variables in diction: the word aoi 青い typically means “blue,” though it blends with what English designates on the color spectrum as green. Bluegreen might be a reasonable compromise, but it’s not that aoi designates a chromatic “in-between”since there are distinct words for primary green and blue in Japanese. Whereas midori 緑 can be used to describe only green things, aoi goes both ways: it can describe the clear blue sky, a traffic signal, or mountains (see Wierzbicka 311-313). It makes a difference, due to the same syntactic ambiguity found in the titles of both Nobel Prize acceptance speeches of the Japanese laureates, Kawabata Yasunari and Ōe KenzaburŌ: [adjective]+[noun]+possessive+I/Myself. As Ōe pointed out, Kawabata’s title could mean “Myself, of Beautiful Japan” or “Beautiful Me, of Japan”; Ōe playfully titled his so as to retain the grammatical ambiguity: “Myself, of Ambiguous Japan,” or “Ambiguous Me, of Japan.” And as with Ōe’s usage (following Kathleen Raine, on William Blake), it behooves us to think of this ambiguity in contradistinction to vagueness. In this case, the color can apply to the sea (umi 海) or to the algae (mo 藻) is it Blue Sea of Algae or Sea

7Sea of Blue Algae

of Blue Algae? A blue sea (or ocean, possibly) with green algae would be most familiar, as long as we picture the algae as a substantial variety rather than the wispy type that can make a sea appear green, filling it, occupying it totally. The algae itself could be blue, which would be odd, otherworldly. The very word “algae” contains rather strong connotations in English: many might conjure images of neglected fish tanks or stagnant ponds, rather than healthy, beautiful, delicious plants undulating in the oceans’ currents. I considered other options such as “kelp” or even “kelp forest.” However, in the world of transnational health-food trends, algae can connote a superfood, something rich in nutrition and that is added to everything from juice blends to facial creams. My casual survey (via social media) revealed a rather positive response to the word, which I believe shows the strengthening of the latter association over time (or perhaps that my networks include a lot of health-conscious foodies!). In Japanese, mo 藻 simply means sea plants, a part of the everyday diet in many forms (nori, wakame, and so on). Mizuta’s Japanese title also builds on the

8 Sea of Blue Algae

multiplicity of meanings that a phoneme can denote depending on the kanji used to represent it.1 The algae (mo 藻) is clearly a transfiguration of its homophone, mo 喪, which means “mourning.” The sea is a drifting depth of mourning, a place beyond normal, clear memory, a place one temporarily inhabits uncontrollably, unconsciously in a natural process of extending certain aspects of the life of the deceased. Mizuta’s “Afterword” to the original Japanese edition lays out her enlightening take on the connections between mourning, memory, and poetry:

For some time, I was floating in the timeless sea of mourning (喪), and I began to realize that, although when an other disappears, one’s self too becomes invisible, when that other is the deceased, they linger on inside us. And I knew: the fact that mourning is a condition that doesn’t urge us out of [that sea] means that it invites a communion with that other that we couldn’t enjoy during the span of their lives. The

1 This kind of pun is a rare technique for Mizuta, though other Japanese poets employ it. See in particular my introduction to Yoshimasu GŌzŌ’s poem, “Mo Chuisle,” in Alice Iris Red Horse (New Directions, edited by Forrest Gander, forthcoming 2016).

9Sea of Blue Algae

poems offered herein are creations of that period when, gradually something becomes visible, that is, I don’t quite understand, a phenomenon or expression of the mind and heart seeking to initiate the movement out from that condition.

Since long ago, poems in requiem or for the repose of souls have been written in abundance, however I think thatsince mourning is a state wherein both yourself and, moreover, your words are lostthere are not many poems squarely addressing its unknowables, its untellables.2

She adds that, emerging from this condition of mourning, “There was nothing to remember; that is, illusory scenes from the beyond of memory, hues from phantom images I’d never seen were resurrected as memories. I felt this somehow extended the life of aspects of the other/dead’s heart that had nothing to do with mourning or with myself.” Thus, although “blue” can also be green as algae, the blue should evoke the blues of melancholy painted

2 “Unknowables”: shirienaimono/知り得ないもの; untellables: katarienaimono/語り得ないもの. See Mizuta’s Aoi mo-no umi, “Atogaki.”

10 Sea of Blue Algae

over a time, like Picasso’s “blue period,” initiated by the passing of someone dear. This blue tints a series of poems here, as in Mizuta’s The Road Home, with “Poem in Blue,” and here with “Digital Blue,” “Give Me Blue,” and the eponymous final section of this anthology, “Sea of Blue Algae.” This latter section devotes focus tothough does not bluntly depictthe Great TŌhoku Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the aftermath of the massive tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima. As others have noted, and some have debated, 3/11 (as it has come to be known in Japan) brought an extended period of shock. This period engulfs the immediate survivors of Japan’s northeastern prefectures, but also bears on anyone who faces the daily reality of living both with the knowledge that such disaster may come again at any time and with the haunting uncertainty of continued radiation leakage from the damaged reactor in Fukushima. This includes anyone in Japan, and from among the larger population, it forces different questions and doubts on different groups. For writers, it compels the inquiry into poetry’s potential, what it can do and express as well as what it cannotthe limits of creative expression.

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Along with other poets, such as Itō Hiromi, Mizuta has questioned writing poetry about 3/11is it productive?advising a kind of “cultural digestion” (“文化的にダイジェスト”) before attempts at writing in response to the disaster. Such writing should be contextualized at least as broadly as WWII Hiroshima and Nagasaki hibakusha experiencesafter which local writers struggled for decades to find ways to depict, access, process, share, relive, and perhaps above all: prevent the forgetting that makes a recurrence all the more likely. Mizuta’s poetry evokes a kinship with the writings of Patrick Modiano, who has persistently explored post-memory and the “constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion,” the latter an erosion played out in our cities (as articulated in his Nobel acceptance speech). As Kawakami Akane has argued, Modiano’s characters “do their utmost to avoid remembering” and to “shirk the responsibility of memory and thence commitment” (87). His Livret de famille (1977), for example, depicts young characters who deny not only their individual memories, but the collective memories that then fail to become post-memory, an important source not only of historical wisdom but of identity and sense of self. Also, Rue des


Boutiques Obscures (1978; Missing Person in English) and Dora Bruder (1997), suggest post-memory as a condition of memory passed unconsciouslynot communicated directly through a faithful retelling necessarily, but often inherited indirectly, written into patterns of trauma, into the repressed, unspoken, or unconscious elements of a family or culture. Mourning then, and the sea of blue algae, should be paradoxically associated with both the drive to remember and the natural act of giving up that other who is remembereda letting go without oblivion, a devotion that doesn’t clutch its object. We can view this in terms of the alternative responses to loss identified by Sigmund Freud in his famous treatise, Mourning and Melancholia. Freud argued that despite the outward similarities between states of mourning and melancholy, there were key differences: mourning is generally associated with the loss of a particular object one held dear and is a conscious state during which one works through to some form of letting go. Melancholy on the other hand is more of an unconscious process without an identifiable or singular loss, and is therefore regarded as an unwell condition. In Mizuta’s poems herein, the sea of blue algae should

13Sea of Blue Algae

be seen as seesawing between a conscious mourning of a known lost object and the more general, potentially pathological stagnation of melancholia. Mizuta’s collection thus richly explores the intimate connections and ambiguous distinctions between the states of mourning and melancholy at the levels of collective and individual memory. Bringing things full circle to the title, Sea of Blue Algae evokes oceanic images of Jean Rhys’s postcolonial novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, linking the personal in that central image. The sea is both the space of mourning-melancholy for the individual, and collectively the site of destruction, pollution, and ritual cycles of death and return through its connections to 3/11 and the Obon festival.

Several Japanese words are used in this collection that offer us an opportunity to unfold meaning rather than translate. I suggest doing so in the spirit of Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire

Unpacking Untranslatables:On Monogatari and YamambaII


des intraduisibles, translated (unironically) and explicated by Emily Apter (in Against World Literature). Cassin’s “untranslatables” are concepts used in (European) philosophy that are most richly understood in their original language, words that, when we try to translate them, lose the originality, nuance and power that initially made them such key concepts for thinkers in that language. Translating them may be possible in the sense that they function in a jury-rigged semantic imitation, but it is impossible in a fuller sense. When that fuller sense is deemed crucial, the word becomes an untranslatable.3

In that spirit, a word about the word monogatari. As translation frequently has afforded opportunity to observe, the term monogatari calls for some hypercontextualization. By this, I mean that the word gives the opportunity to expand our thinking if we just render it legible (by Romanizing it), and we get to learn a new word, along with a few of its linkages. Let us examine monogatari: 物語. That breaks down: 物mono / 語gatari. 物 means “thing,” but often

3 Incidentally, Apter critiques Moretti for his mischaracterization of the term monogatari (122), but on the previous page says that The Pillow Book is the classic example of monogatari. To be clear, Sei Shonogan’s textundisputed classic though it has becomeis not a monogatari.

15Sea of Blue Algae

refers more specifically to material things, things of this world. However, unlike its fraternal twin, 事 koto, it can designate immaterial things and concepts too (some will say nay to this; to them I say: 言葉は不思議な物だ). The latter character, 語, comes from the verb 語る kataru, meaning “to tell” (a story, etc.). Thus, monogatari is often translated as “tale(s)”: as in Genji monogatari becoming The Tale of Genji or Heike monogatari becoming Tales of the Heike. Translators before me have wrestled with options such as “epic” or “novel,” though others have critiqued these English terms as evincing a Western bias. The Tale of Genji, written at the beginning of the eleventh century, is thus often called “the world’s oldest novel.” But given the regional development of the novel as a well-defined genre, this term calls forth a set of genre-specific standards by which Japanese monogatari might be judged as having diverged from, or worsefailed to meet (see Lindberg-Wada for an excellent survey of the genre and its history). Thus rather than wrestle, I ask you to wrestle: please learn the word monogatari. I have done half the work by Romanizing it; and if it is difficult to pronounce, I recommend asking someone who speaks Japanese and enjoying the exchange that invites. Ultimately,


Monogatari’s way, its telling of things material and abstract, affords both linear and wandering narrative styles, freedom of narrative voice, shifting emphases, varied focalizations, and other narratological flexibilities that make their classical Japanese exemplars a pleasure to read. In Sea of Blue Algae, monogatari appears in several poems, the first of which is “Poetry Will Wait for Me.” This poem sets up monogatari as a process without end, an anti-telos that separates the spatial metaphor of the road from the linear implication of destination:

No matter how far I pursue I never arrive at the end Somewhere a poet will appear and tell Monogatari of a road with unfixed destination

This complex relationship between space and lines of language are developed in the next poem, “Digital Blue,” which opens:

Hurriedly, I Throw words to the ocean depths

17Sea of Blue Algae

Soon grammar and metaphor cover the blue The digital blue now powerless All becomes the space of my monogatari Blanketed in characters Spun into threads From my very own Memories like secrets

This continued development of monogatari as a space rather than a line helps us understand the term, and the term in turn helps us understand Mizuta’s writing of the relationship between language, memory and mourning. This space is composed of both characters and memory spun into thread and cloth, and draped over the depths of mourning like Borges’ 1:1 map of the empire. It expands beyond that though, and the poem’s persona finds her monogatari opaque, something that conceals the nocturnal heavens:

As the monogatari ends One more sheet of darkness Pitch black as the cosmos No matter how long I wait


The stars and moon stay hidden […] My monogatari Peers deep into the reverse of the blackness Yet there is nothing But cold metal

She goes on to speak of this in the light of acceptance (“All’s right with the world”) and concludes by insisting on the importance of weaving (unlike Penelope) this space of monogatari, of layering patterns of word over world:

Today Monogatari is absent It must be rewritten, This monogatari

In “Give Me Blue,” Mizuta seems to evoke Elizabeth Bishop’s famous fish (“The Fish”), one also described in terms of tattered wallpaper. In Mizuta’s poem though, the fish is more mythical and spouts a monogatari:

In the bottom of a fjord

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Fished up on a dangled string Shimmering fish scales From the enchanted Blue fish’s Giant mouth It comes running out: Monogatari.

Again, the monogatari both ends and continues, layered over space and transfigured into landscape:

End of the monogatari Long ago Launching the boat onto the fjord Ensnared in the fog Along with the fish We found ourselves amidst The vanishing landscape

The connection between monogatari and visual artistic creation also evokes the literary concept of shasei (写生), a term meaning “sketching” and which is used with equal ease in discussing poetry and painting. It may seem to


resemble ekphrasis, or the rendering of something visual into words, but the shasei embedded in this monogatari means more of a merging of the functions of both, words merged with reality that resemble a painting. As Mizuta writes, the “Flow of blue ink Parting the algae” is “Crafted into a landscape painting.” Since the algae (藻) in this anthology signals mourning (喪), Mizuta’s poems tie the shasei duality of monogatari to a coping process. Yet unlike a Freudian catharsis through storytelling, herein writing, narrating, or monogatari are not so much an escape from the space of mourning as a diving in without expectation of result. The water and its depths are overdetermined, and both self and that self ’s world are altered as a result. The eponymous final series of poems in this anthology extends the monogatari trope. The seventh poem, “Gravity,” disassociates monogatari from its title object, concluding with the lines:

Long journey Infinite pages of sand How many ashen lumps Can I go on carrying

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Not just my share But theirs too? Is there nothing to smash it with This long Anti-monogatari Its gravity

We have seen monogatari overlaid with the drifting ocean depths, merged with the floating algae, and rendered a woven topographyand here gravity is shown to be its antithesis. The contrasts include allusion: “the infinite pages of sand” recall Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Book of Sand” (1975), which told of a magic book whose pages were as numberless as sand in the desert dunes. This contrastof lightness of substance amidst unbearable heaviness of mourningmarks Mizuta’s use of monogatari in a way seen too in her collection, The Road Home. In “Hagoromo-grass Hut,” the schizotrajectory of wandering reinforces the notion that interwoven narratives may help us traverse a space until the lightness of the hagoromo, that divine feather mantle, helps us recover:

Taking aimless wandering to its limit


Accidentally Or possibly, long ago There may have been something Forgotten monogatari Unknown monogatari A tall tale, A long long time ago A stranger’s monogatari Wanting to recover the hagoromo

As to what is recovered, it is not something of the pastfor that too is faded or lost to oblivionbut something new, something that incorporates the space of monogatari, the space of mourning. Affinities with The Road Home do not stop here. In both collections, though perhaps less directly in Sea of Blue Algae, Mizuta’s poems contain autobiographical elements but hold them at a distance to seek more universal significance. In narratological terms, they more closely function like a dramatic monologue that reaches across the fourth-wall. On the other side of that wall is both the reader’s world and the poet herself, creating while observing the creation unfold its own independent meanings.

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On top of this, they are both monogatari narratives and vernacular katarinaoshi renarrations, weaving unconscious collections of images, thoughts, and words in ways that rearrange the reality they depict. There are traces of translation here: Jakobson’s intrasemiotic translation, bordering on adaptations independent of any original text or autobiographical reality. This has precedent in the haiku tradition, which can hint at the autobiographical, but provides readers the richest experience when interpreted as suggestive, with an imagist openness. But independence doesn’t imply a lack of dialogue, with the poems building intricate interactions with literary precedents. Following the honkadori tradition strongly present in The Road Home, Mizuta here presents a new constellation of intertexts and polyvalent quotations: Edgar Allen Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Erasmus, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and more. I call them polyvalent, because sometimes these appear on the surface, visible and intact, but in other instances they are subtle, set off only by unusual enjambment or spacing. The punctuation too is, in keeping with most of Japan’s poetic tradition, minimal. Haikai/haiku, tanka, and


other traditional genres typically contain no punctuation and are generally written in a single vertical line. Literary forms began to experiment with punctuation during the Meiji Period (1868-1912), when writers began to translate Western texts and incorporate their styles (see Twine and Seeley). In Japanese, this anthology contains no periods, quotation marks, or any other punctuation except two question marks and nineteen commas (句読点 or 読点)an average frequency of .76 per poem. In the English, I tried to remain faithful to this elegant flow, leaving only enjambmentand all its suggestive ambiguitiesto replace punctuation as often as possible. Even keeping it minimalist though, there are in all five colons and nine periods, two sets of parentheses, and an average of about five commas per poem. Common sense dictates that punctuation in Japanese is less important due to its use of grammatical subject markers, object markers, and syllabic indications of quotation; in conversation, they are often omitted, and Mizuta’s poems are in between the colloquial and the “properly” grammatical, though leaning clearly more toward the colloquial on this point. I take some liberty with punctuation, and suggest the following as an interesting

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experiment: read with this colloquial minimalism in mind, allowing the natural rhythms to parse the poems. Since these rhythms are always multiple, the meaning can change with each parsing. Rather than see these as poems that “defy parsing” (as Donald Keene does with Nakamura Kusatao’s, p. 159), we might see them as poems that invite creative parsing. Other forms of creative reading are less possible in the English. A small but repeated one comes from the connotations of Japanese botanical terms. Plant names are symbolic in Japanese according to a structured tradition of kigo (seasonal words). Moreover, some names are even obviously poetic in their semantics, like the “beautyberry,” which is called Murasaki Shikibu 紫式部 in Japanesethe name of the author of The Tale of Genji (or can we now say Genji monogatari?). The tea flower in Japanese is miyako wasure 京わすれ, meaning “forgetting the capital,” suggestive of a bucolic life or at least a temporary flight from the travail of city life to where nature offers its own beautiful oblivion. The poems of Section II: Garden build on a kind of natural beauty that is maintained and nurtured by human hands. The most prominent pair of hands belong


to the “Gardenkeeper,” an unusual word in English as it is in the Japanese (Mizuta uses niwamori 庭守り instead of the more common niwashi 庭師). One might interpret Mizuta’s gardenkeeper as a figure of Death. However, he seems to lack the implied foreboding, the darkness, and the finality. Instead, we might see him as functioning as more of an intermediary between home and wilderness, life and death, reminiscent of the monks in Yoshioka Minoru’s (吉岡実) “Four Monks” (“四人の僧侶” Yonin no sōryo) poems published in 1958. Yoshioka (1919-1990) does depict these monks in connection with death, but equally with birth, sending off the dead in funerary preparations, purification rituals, the exploration of nature, and the writing of history. The death images are connected with the act of sending off. This is a point sometimes lost in translationas with the title of the Academy Award winning film, Okuribito (dir. Takita YŌjirŌ, 2008), released in English as Departures. The Buddhist rituals developed in Japan emphasize this seeing off, as one would a visitor. The Japanese title actually means “the sender.” Given the prejudices in Japan that have long existed against those who handle the bodies of the dead, poetic depictions of

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their laborboth the ritual and the pragmaticshould be seen as an intervention, a claiming of the importance of that role. Associating “the sender” with the mourner recuperates both to the importanteven holyfunction of an intermediary. Yet the gardenkeeper is not the only symbolic intermediary. It finds parallel in Mizuta’s works in the figure of the yamamba (山姥), or elderly woman living in the mountains. Similar to monogatari, the word yamamba is often treated as an untranslatable in English, and has been a subject of considerable debate in Japanese letters. The yamamba is frequently depicted as a witch or monstrous creature in Japanese literature, inhabiting a wild space and menacing (particularly male) travelers. Were we to read the yamamba in this way, the garden would be opposed to civilization and cultivation. However, Mizuta depicts the garden as a kind of compromise with the wild, and the yamamba mediates between civilization and the true wilderness. Meera Viswanathan has argued that the “topos of the yamamba” should be understood as “a kind of palimpsest of women’s quest throughout the ages for a place of authentic being, a quest both volatile and indeterminate” (in Schalow and


Walker, 258). Mizuta would likely agree: her feminist take on the yamamba views her as a woman typically beyond facile gender binaries. She lives apart from society in order to avoid social pressures, or to cultivate a more authentic self.

“One-year Memorial” contains a list of temples and shrines, each with its corresponding charms. These charms are typically for sale, and are designated for particular protective ends, such as passing exams, traffic safety, good health, and financial success.

“Life Notes” is the most directly based on the author’s experiencein this case, she was invited to write a family autobiography by Saitama Shimbun. After pondering questions of process, Mizuta passed on the project, and instead transformed her thoughts into this meditation on life-writing.

“Obon” (Mizuta actually uses the alternative

Notesto the Poem TranslationsIII

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Urabon 盂蘭盆) credits Arechi (Wasteland) poets as her introduction to John Donne. When “Arechi” appears in quotation marks I leave it as the proper name, “Arechi,” by which they are also often known in Western languages; when I find the word presented al fresco, I translate it as wasteland. It is worth mentioning that the Ministry of Communications and Transportation (逓信省) in Japan was only functional until 1949, then split into two other ministries.

“A Single Drawing” repeatedly refers to “white night.” For those not of the most northern of climes, this phrase may mislead one to imagine a bright night under a full moon, perhaps shining down on a snowy landscape. However, the term “white night” designates the phenomenon of those summer nights in the upper northern hemisphere when the sun never quite goes down, but merely circles the horizon, rendering night irrelevant in terms of cycles of luminescence. The word thus connotes the northern region of Japan’s main island, especially the northeastern region of TŌhoku. This region figures centrally in Japan’s nostalgic musical genre, enka, which often depicts heartbroken


women traveling north to seek the refuge of hometown and family (see Occhi, p. 152, for discussion and examples). Since this is also the region that experienced the 3/11 earthquake covered above, the northern imagery underscores Mizuta’s subtle but substantial engagement in this series with the disaster’s aftermath in its many valences.

In “Vomiting,” the name of South Korean sculptor Lee Bul becomes a macaronic pun in the line “Lee Bul’s soothing sooth.” In the Japanese, the pun is clear:

イ・ブル慰撫る技

I Buru iburu-waza

Her name is phonetically identical to the verb iburu, meaning to soothe or pacify (as with a person’s anxiety or anger), but also cloyingly so. In other translations, I have experimented with allowing meaning to arise spontaneously from cross-linguistic puns (for example, with Yoshimasu GŌzŌ’s poems in Alice Iris Red Horse). That is, I would start with whatever the base word was

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for the pun (Lee Bul) and allow the meaning of the pun to arise within English sound affinities. In this case, the possibilities seemed to diverge too severely from the calming meaning that arose in the Japanese, and instead I transferred the pun to the word Mizuta derives from Lee Bul’s nameiburuand let “soothing” meet “sooth” for a rough parallel in technique. The reference to Lee Bul derives from the poem’s engagement with her sculpture of a dog vomiting on Tokyo. Technically, the dog statue (apparently modeled on her own pet of seventeen years) was displayed in an exhibition in the Mori Art Museum, placed next to the windows in the gallery over fifty stories high above Tokyo. Rather than seeing this placement as a defilement of Tokyo’s urban landscape, scholar and art critic Anna Battista interprets it as the “disclosure of all the time and memories [the dog] shared with the artist.” However, it reminds us that memory, like art or any signifying artifact, changes meaning depending on where it is placed and how it is spaced. And this vomiting image leads Mizuta to one more traditional (intralinguistic) pun I would like to revive here:


In white vomit 白い吐きもので

Nightscape turned footwear 一枚の履物となった夜景

The words for vomit hakimono (in the top line above) and for footwear hakimono (bottom line above) are homophones.

“Splitting” references Federico Fellini’s’ film E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983). The “funeral ship” (埋葬舟) comes from that film, and also suggests the funeral lanterns at Obon, which light the way for the dead to return to their home across the ocean. The duality is thus that between the stationary container that buries and contains the dead within the earth (a Western-style coffin) and the mobile vehicle that guides them away from this world (the Obon lanterns).

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References

Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso, 2013.

Battista, Anna. “Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs To You Only @ Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum.” Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion and Style. February 24, 2012. Web.

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

Borges, Jorge Luis. El hacedor. New York: Vintage Español, 2013.

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Acknowledgements

The translator wishes to thank Sandra Fahy for the translation retreats; Jeffrey Angles for the stimulating exchange on the poems of the final section of this anthology (please see his translations too, forthcomingin his collection of poems on the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, These Things Here and Now) and for his early and meticulous reading of this volume; the members of my literary translation seminars at UC Riverside and JIU, and particularly Ujiie Shūko for her insightful feedback; Yamashita Syōtarō and Satō Minami for key verifications; and the Josai International University Press’s staff for their solid support and professional presentation of this volume. Above all, as a translator I feel very fortunate to work with an author as knowledgeable and bilingual as Mizuta Noriko―I applaud and thank her for her attention to detail and the free reign she gave to my translations. All errors herein are my own.

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To the River

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